


singularity

by malfaisant



Category: Marvel 616
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-16
Updated: 2013-08-16
Packaged: 2017-12-23 16:18:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/928576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/malfaisant/pseuds/malfaisant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Be safe, Steve."</p>
            </blockquote>





	singularity

**Author's Note:**

> Set (mostly) during _Infinity_ #1, and canon-compliant up until then. Heavily references events throughout Hickman's _Avengers_ / _New Avengers_ , among other things. It won't make much sense if you haven't been following the current run, but other than that you should be fine, ideally. Also, grey consent issues because of memory wiping complications?
> 
> 08/17: kudos to Kiran for giving this story a quick look the first time around. I've since gone back and edited the fic better; hopefully the errors weren't too distracting.

_Stand down._

_The end is not what you think it’s going to be._

* * *

**_now:_ **

It’s not that Tony hasn’t been expecting something like this for a while. World-ending scenarios are just something you have to suck up and deal with as an Avenger. That, and when the living embodiment of the universe shows up on your doorstep and starts spewing ominous warnings of the end of days, well, that kind of thing was hard to ignore.

The petrified corpse of the Living Tribunal on a nameless dead moon, the other Earths hanging in skies the color of rust and dried blood, those were hard to ignore too.

Tony Stark is not a man of faith, but he is a man of science, a futurist. He never ignored the cryptic words of the entity possessing Tamara Devoux—got frustrated by, yes, but he never dismissed them, not when they only confirmed the things he most feared.

But foreseeing an eventuality, in spite of any preparations he might have made for it, is an entirely different story than finally coming face to face with the real thing. At the last crackle of the Kree distress signal, he feels something cold and hollow tighten in his chest. There’s the knowledge of fire raining down on worlds half a galaxy away as Agent Abigail Brand pulls up star maps, the Builders’ projected trajectory for Earth glowing bright on the screens, and he thinks...it’s tiring, being in a constant state of fear for everything he cared about.

The signal had come in a mere half-hour ago. Right now, Tony is alone, looking out the observation deck of the SWORD space station; the Peak is in geocentric orbit around Earth, and some thousands of miles beneath him is New York. Home. But his gaze is directed outward. The HUD traces interstellar vectors and trajectories in front of him, thin dotted lines leading light-years away, out into the vastness of space.

He takes off the helmet and holds it under his arm, to breathe easier.

There’s certainly a hint of resentment there, in the forcible way this all further changes his perception of things, where the unchartered and the yet-unknown, the inscrutable black, used to represent something beautiful, the ultimate destiny of humanity, but now suggests its extinction. How instead of wonder, of discovery, of the glint of stars, space is now death and war, ancient monsters hiding in the dark.

His mind pores over terabytes of data, trying to anticipate everything they’ll need. Flight plans. Weapon specs. Rosters, probably two teams. The second can be led by Carol. They will have to leave as soon as possible, as soon as he can get the quincruisers ready—

A hand on his shoulder startles Tony out of his thoughts. He closes his eyes, takes a moment to steel himself, before he turns away from the station bay windows and faces Steve, smile firmly in place.

“I’ve been back two days,” Tony says, trying to keep his voice as light as he can. “ _Two days,_ and now you're high-tailing off to space. I didn’t even get to show you my vacation slideshow. There’s this great picture of me with a Badoon warship exploding in the background.”

“We knew this was going to happen, Tony,” says Steve. His eyes are cast down as he takes Tony’s gauntlet-clad hand in his, intertwining their fingers.

Tony leans forward, rests his forehead against Steve's, and speaks his next words quietly. “Yeah. Guess you just have to see it when you come back, huh?”

The light-hearted smile on Steve’s face is sincere, as though Tony hadn’t just asked him to move mountains. “When I get back,” Steve says, “it’s a date.”

* * *

_It started with an idea, the spark that ignited the fire—a legend that grew in the telling. It started with an idea and the idea was expansion._

_It started with two men. One was life and one was death._

_You look at your hands and find you cannot disagree with your sentence, and you don't want to. He was life, and has always been, light and golden like the sun._

* * *

**_then:_ **

The Uni-Power’s been on Earth before, and has taken a variety of human hosts. Gabriel Vargas. Matt Murdock. Laura Kinney. Sue Storm. Tamara Devoux is only the latest in the line of people who have come into contact with the Uni-Power, but they know next to nothing about her history, no records aside from what the hospital managed to dig up. She is Jane Doe, and has been for ten years. She barely exists before she woke up from her coma, until the living consciousness of the Universe decided to take her as its host.

This is a math problem, and Tamara Devoux is an unknown variable.

Tony visits the Baxter Building one afternoon, dropping by the lab to pick up Reed’s notes and research on the subject. He meets Sue on the way out, and she sits him in the kitchen with a cup of coffee.

Tony stirs sugar into his coffee and watches as Franklin Richards runs past them, looping around the kitchen island before going into the hallway, with a group of Moloids, Valeria Richards, and a HERBIE robot dressed like Doctor Doom trailing right behind him. Sue calmly takes a sip of her coffee.

Tony taps his fingernail on the table, a tap-tap rhythm on the marble countertop. “They grow up fast, huh?”

“Oh, skip the pleasantries, Tony. Surely we’re familiar enough that you can just tell me what you need to talk to me about,” she replies.

“I get it, too busy for old friends, huh?” He shakes his head dramatically and clutches at his chest, wounded.

Sue raises an eyebrow at him with a smirk, clearly unimpressed. “In about ten minutes, I have to throw you out of the kitchen so I have space to make fourteen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and I’ve been emphatically assured the world would end if the crusts are left on. Also, there’s a vacation through time and space that I need to organise for, and I know for a fact that neither Val nor Franklin have packed their socks yet.”

“Yeah, Reed said something about that. Family vacation through the cosmos? Going back in time to watch the Big Bang up close?”

“Among other things. We thought the children would find it educational,” replies Sue, “and speaking of my husband, I’m going to take pity on you and segue this conversation to how you picked up his notes on Captain Universe just now.”

“Excellent segue," he says with a small salute. "Alright, can you tell me anything about the time you possessed the Uni-Power?”

“I’m guessing you’re not asking out of curiosity.”

“Captain Universe is earthside and has a new host, who is...complicated.” Tony brings his cup forward and prepares to take a sip. “But it approached me and Steve and we’re thinking of trying out a new thing. So?”

Sue looks down into her cup thoughtfully, and tucks a lock of blonde hair behind her ear. When she spoke, her voice is steady but solemn. “It came to us because it was broken, but even then, I felt its sadness, and happiness, and nothingness, and wholeness, all at once. The pathos of everything and nothing. I glimpsed infinity,” she says, turning her face up to meet Tony's gaze. “It’s a terrifying feeling, simultaneously knowing how insignificant we all are at the end of it all...and also how each and every one of us is the most important being in all of creation.”

“How can we all be the most important if all of us are the most important?” asks Tony.

She smiles at him, kindly but not with a little amusement at the question. “Can you pick just one most important person in your life?”

Tony pauses and frowns, before giving a small shake of his head. “Well, it’s exactly like that,” says Sue, closing her eyes serenely as she takes a long sip of her tea.

They sit in mostly comfortable silence, until they both finish their drinks and Sue shoos him out of the kitchen, just as she promised. Tony thanks her for the coffee, and makes sure to ruffle Val’s hair on the way out.

* * *

_**then:** _

The quinjet is somewhere over the Atlantic, endless blue above and below them. Tony undoes the topmost button of his shirt, loosens the knot of his tie, and sprawls in his co-pilot seat, trying his best to seem bored. The suitcase with the modular calibration instruments Reed requested stands at his feet, flush against the side of his chair.

He taps a fingernail on the armrest of his chair, setting a steady rhythm, one-two, one-two.

The call from Wakanda came in as a signal on the Avengers' priority line one. It was a short, terse message, T’Challa's voice flat and without inflection as he called for a meeting of the Illuminati.

Steve is to his right, sitting in the pilot’s seat, his back ramrod straight as he stares right ahead past the clear windshield. Numbers and vectors ran down the glass, computerised flight projections, maintained altitude and the like, but Tony's getting the impression that Steve is seeing past all that, seeing only the horizon. Unlike Tony, who has his armor stashed in the back of the quinjet, Steve is already in uniform, his cowl pushed down, red leather-gloved hands firm on the controls.

“It’s an hour to Wakanda,” Tony says. “We’re going to have to talk before then eventually.”

Steve turns his head slightly towards him as he replies, but doesn’t meet his eyes. “What is there to talk about, Tony?”

“So we’re not going to talk about how we’re going to a super secret meeting of that super secret group you told us was a bad idea?”

“You’re obviously agitated. Any conversation we’ll have is just going to be counter-productive,” Steve replies, with the serenity of someone saying his part in a well-tread argument, against a familiar partner.

“Agitated? Me?" Tony says flippantly. "I don't know, maybe it's the fact that you’re practically _radiating_ righteous resolve. What if it's contagious? I don’t want to turn into some righteous resolve-Hulk and instead of yelling ‘SMASH’ my tagline’s going to be ‘my principles are more important than any logical objections you have!’ See? It just doesn’t flow off the tongue right.”

“You told me T’Challa felt the same as I did when you approached him about the group.” Steve's voice is terse and stilted, as though he's trying his best not to stoop down to Tony’s level. Predictably enough, this just rankles Tony even more.

Tony crosses his arms across his chest, and maybe he’s being petulant, but he's never been one to let things go once they've gotten under his skin. “And you’re just going to take it on good faith that in the times when I thought this unholy gathering was necessary, what, I was just being needlessly pessimistic?” Despite his best efforts at sounding unaffected, he can’t dull the edge of resentment in the words. Well, he’s not a little bitter.

For a second, Steve stiffens, before he slowly, deliberately, leans forward on the conn and flips the switch to turn on the autopilot. A sense of urgency rises up Tony’s spine, a distinct suggestion of regret, but before he can decide whether or not he wants to apologise, Steve turns in his seat to look Tony in the eye.

”My feelings on the matter haven’t changed, Tony.”

“I never really apologised.”

“And I’m not stupid enough to try to get one from you.”

“So is that it? You just trust T’Challa more than you trust me?” he asks, his face blank.

“I trust you with my life,” Steve answers, his voice carefully level, “but not the things you’d be willing to do if you think it’s for my own good.”

Tony turns sharply towards him, uncrosses his arms as he leans forward in his seat. “I’m not—”

“I _know_ how big this is, that T’Challa of all people is calling us together. And you know how I feel about your secret meetings, yet here I am,” Steve interrupts. His eyes are hard, his mouth drawn in a thin line. “T’Challa is a good man. You may think that people like us don’t know how to compromise, but we know what needs to be done, and what isn’t worth being done.”

Tony looks down at his hands, where he's curled them tightly into fists, his knuckles gleaming white. “This isn’t just T’Challa changing his mind, Steve,” Tony says emphatically. “Something happened that _made_ him change his mind.”

“And we’re going to deal with it when we get there.” Steve stands up, and goes down to one knee in front of Tony. He closes a hand over Tony's clenched fist. “Tony, look at me.”

Tony doesn’t respond, doesn't dare meet Steve's eyes, but then he feels fingers on his jaw gently tilt his face up. Right now is probably a terrible time to note how incredibly blue his eyes are.

“Whatever our disagreements have been about this,” Steve says, earnest and calm, staring intently at him, “they’re in the past. Whatever’s waiting for us in Wakanda will test us, but we’re stronger than this, Tony, and we’ve weathered too much to break now.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I can’t know what’s coming, but I'll know what I'll have to do.”

Tony blinks, and quashes the half-mad urge to laugh, loudly and hysterically. “You know you’re basically asking me to be as noble as Captain America.”

“No, I’m only asking you to trust me,” Steve says. “This is bigger than the two of us, but I want to know that you’ll be on my side for this. No more half-measures, no more lesser evils. We do this together and we do it right, or not at all.”

Tony stares wide-eyed at Steve, before his shoulders slump forward, all the anger having leached out of him. “You know I want the same thing.”

Steve leans forward to kiss him, just a soft press of his lips on Tony’s. Tony kisses back, makes a small moan, and tells himself to accept the plea for what it is. He curls his fingers in Steve’s hair, brushes the lock of hair fanning over his eyes, before resting their foreheads together.

“We shouldn’t be fighting. We’re the last people who should be fighting,” says Steve, murmuring against his mouth.

“I don’t _want_ to fight. I don’t like fighting you.”

“So just promise me this.”

“I—I think in worst-case scenarios, Steve. And how bad this has to be for T'Challa and Reed to—”

Steve cuts him off with another kiss, and Tony gives a half-hearted cry of protest before grudgingly giving in, lets Steve’s mouth in his. The kiss gentles, until Tony is pliant, mostly placated under Steve, his eyes closed.

Steve breaks the kiss and leans away, and Tony lazily opens his eyes to see him smiling at him, looking not a little smug. “Is that how you’re going to resolve every argument from now on? Kiss me until my brain shuts down enough to get what you want?”

“I’m a pragmatic man, Tony,” Steve says, carding his fingers through Tony’s hair, and it's almost involuntary, the way Tony leans in to the touch.

“Self-satisfied is not a good look on you, Captain America,” he replies, splaying his hands on the nape of Steve’s neck and pulling him onto his lap. He loses himself in the kiss, focuses on Steve’s warm mouth, and desperately ignores the sense of dread curling in the pit of his stomach.

They won’t be landing for at least an hour; this is a comfort he’ll take, while he can.

* * *

_**now:** _

Tamara looks peaceful in the stasis tube, and if Tony didn’t know any better she could've been just asleep. He stands alone in the room with the unconscious Captain Universe. Elsewhere on the station, in the command centre of the Peak, Steve and Ex Nihilo are speaking with Agent Brand, debriefing SWORD on the threat of the Builders. They will have just summoned Isabel Kane to ask her about the orders she's received as part of the Shi’ar Imperial Guard.

It will all be things they already know. More confirmation of their worst fears. The stars continue to burn, spinning on their axes and indifferent to their worries.

“Something eats at your heart, Anthony Stark, or the little that’s left of it.”

Tony turns around to face Abyss. Black wisps of smoke trail about her, a dark cloud like a halo around her harshly beautiful face, depthless shadows that make her name all too apt.

“Honestly, why do you guys all have to speak in riddles?” Tony says with a raise of an eyebrow. “Is that part of how your Builders programmed you?”

“Programmed? Tche,” Abyss responds with a disdainful grimace. “You speak of us as though we were your computers. We are nothing like your cold machines.”

“You’re right. Machines are far more agreeable.”

Abyss smirks, and tilts her head to the side. Tony pointedly feels toyed with. “Can you say that for all the machines you’ve made, tinkerer? Can you vouch for all the things your hands have built?”

Tony feels himself pale. He shakes his head and glares acidly at her. “What do you want, Abyss?”

Abyss extends a hand between them, palm held open. Black smoke gathers in her fingers, a swirl of abstract darkness, before it curls into a sphere. A charcoal Earth floats in her hand, rotating slowly on its axis.

“For you to listen,” she says simply. Her voice resonates in his chest, a deep timbre that pierces through him like an icicle.

“My brother and I, we are light and shadow. Ex Nihilo is unadulterated life, but I—I am something far more. I am simply the state of things.” The smoke Earth distorts itself, splits apart, distorting into the shape of an eye.

“I have seen my brother bring forth life where there was none on a hundred worlds, and I have seen my father-Aleph raze a thousand more. But your Earth is something I have never seen.” The lines on Abyss’ sharply planed face deepen as she becomes lost in thought, her typical antipathy replaced by a contemplative sort of worry. The eye over her hand blinks.

But she looks unsure for only a second. Her eyes flit back to cut right into his, narrowed, suspicious, and Tony holds her stare, a challenging expression to match. The outline of the eye becomes a circle, and the pupil expands to fill it, until the smoke is a perfect opaque black disc. It's flat and placid for several moments, before it starts to swirl, transforming into a vortex.

“Your world is an anomaly, and you are unpredictable creatures, a force of chaos and destruction that far outstrips anything my brother and I are capable of,” Abyss says coldly, and closes her fist tightly around the black hole, dissipating it to a formless trail of smoke. “Our father-Aleph was right when it set the Earth aside for world-razing.”

Tony frowns. “Then why help us? Why not just step aside and let your makers come our way?”

A curl of black smoke escapes from her fist and floats slowly toward him. Abyss looks in the direction of Tamara's stasis tube. “I came, because our Mother wills it so. The Goddess called to us and in her infinite wisdom and mercy, has asked us to help you.”

“We’ll get through this, with or without your help,” Tony says, indignant.

“Oh, I do not doubt that. Humanity is simple, but you have discovered how to make yourselves dangerous,” she says, before smiling, “and you are the prime example of it.”

The black smoke suddenly shoots forward to swirl dizzyingly over his eyes. He sees Abyss smile through gaps in the smoke, before the black thins out and hovers in a cloud around his head.

“I can sense your guilt. I can taste your fear. I know you have done such great, terrible things, for love.” Tendrils of black snake around him as she speaks, trailing down his neck, following the line of his jaw. It’s cold where the smoke touches his skin. Tony tries not to flinch away. “But it matters little what I know. These are dark days ahead of us, and the burden is on you.”

“If it has to be done,” Tony says, willing his voice to stay steady, “the hard decisions no one else can make—“

She laughs, and it rings against the metal walls. “For your sake, I hope it will all be worth it.”

Tony's mouth goes dry, his heart skipping a beat, but he's saved from having to reply by Steve entering the room.

Steve stops right at the doorway, and looks back and forth between Tony and Abyss. Abyss takes one look at Steve before she waves her hand, and the smoke around Tony dissipates into nothing. "What's going on here?" Steve says.

Over Steve's shoulder, Izzy Kane is standing on her tiptoes to look into the room. “Are we interrupting something?” she asks.

“No,” Tony replies, before Abyss can say anything. He walks forward and grabs Steve’s hand. “We were just done.”

He all but runs Steve and Izzy out of the room, pulling Steve away by the hand. The expression on Steve’s face is worried, but he doesn’t say anything in front of Izzy, who trails after them, looking mildly confused as the three of them make their way towards the hangar.

He feels Abyss staring at his back the whole time. He doesn’t loosen his grip on Steve’s hand until he's sure he can no longer feel dark tendrils and knowing eyes on his skin, and even then he doesn't let go.

"Did she hurt you, Tony?" Steve finally asks, his voice quiet.

"No, I'm fine, we were just...talking."

“That didn't  _look_ like talking,” Izzy says, jogging forward to talk alongside them. “Anyway, how do we know the evil black smoke lady isn’t evil anymore?”

Steve replies first, his answer tentative but steady. “It doesn’t make me happy to have to work with them, Smasher, but if Captain Universe says we need them, I’m not inclined to disagree.”

“Their mom told them to behave,” says Tony. “They shouldn’t be a problem. Now, you wanna give me a sparknotes of your debrief with Agent Brand?”

“It’s bad, Tony. Gladiator’s summoned all active Imperial Guard members, and even the reserve Subguardians,” Izzy says, looking more worried than Tony has ever seen her. The expression looks wrong on her regularly cheerful face. “I’m summoned to report in as soon as possible.”

Tony stops mid-stride and puts a reassuring hand on her shoulder. He’s mostly sure he manages a smile. “You won’t be going off alone, Izzy. The Avengers are coming with you.”

Izzy turns to the both of them, her eyes widening. “You...you are?”

Steve nods. “The best chance we have is to stand with other worlds,” he says, squeezing Tony's hand as he spoke.

“You’ll be leaving as soon as I can make the ships ready,” Tony adds. “First chance tomorrow morning.”

* * *

_It never ends, until it has to end, and then too late to begin. You have many regrets, but I hope you do not regret this._  

* * *

_**then:** _

It isn’t really all that surprising that Tony will never be entirely comfortable around Captain Universe. She’s a walking, talking violation of several fundamental scientific principles, including the second law of thermodynamics and at least three different postulates of special relativity. Most of the time, Tony manages not to take it personally.

There’s also the whole bit about ‘unpredictable, probably well-intentioned, omnipotent cosmic force’, but Tony doesn't mind that part all that much, as he's too busy being grateful to have her on their side. Kind of like Thor, in a way, but maybe replace the fondness for mead with pie. True to his word, adding blueberry pie to Jarvis’ shopping list had been the first thing Tony did when the Avengers returned from Mars.

Mars was the first test, the trial run for this new machine. Their latest iteration of the Avengers is a mix of old familiar cogs and brand new parts, and it’s still tentative, the way they all fit together, but it’s working, so far.

Steve is probably the reason for that. Scratch that, Steve is definitely the reason. Steve is true north, the fixed point they rally around.

Tony might be projecting, a little.

But Steve points, and they follow, and even with the expanded roster, dealing with Ex Nihilo’s bombs is a hell of a job. The new kids adjust well enough, even if sometimes Tony is floored by how _young_ some of them are. Sam and Bobby have taken to following him around the lab and asking him questions, about his armor, or old Avengers battles, or who would win if Thor and Hyperion got in a fight, all while Tony tries and fails not to be reminded of ducklings. Meanwhile, Izzy and Eden usually pass their time in line for the shower playing Mario Kart, and okay, maybe that's his fault that there are only two showers, but it's not like the older members (who should _definitely_ know better) set particularly stellar examples. Carol and Natasha take the remaining controllers and join the race, while Jess uses her pheromone powers on Clint to cut to the front of the shower line.

Tony can hear them all from the floor above as he huddles in his lab, bent over a computer console. He wipes his brow as he pores over lines and lines of code while Adam, the human Ex Nihilo created, sits across the room from him, staring blankly out onto the cityscape. Occasionally, Adam turns in Tony's direction and speaks to him. Tony is not a little unnerved by the harsh, guttural sounds of his unknown language, which sounds more like code than human speech, but that’s what the decryption algorithm’s for.

“I don’t know where I am, but you seem familiar to me. Have we met?” A voice rings out.

Tony turns around, swiveling suddenly on his chair to see Tamara at the doorway, standing near a workbench crowded with disassembled armor parts. The floor is cold on his bare feet as he steps forward, until he's near enough to place a steadying hand on her arm. She doesn't give any indication that she registers the touch, and instead picks up the bright-red faceplate of the latest Iron Man from the table beside them.

“Hi,” Tony says, careful to keep his voice light and even, “can I help you with anything?”

This is only the third time Tony’s seen her face since they recruited her for the Avengers, uncovered by its usual shroud of stars and darkness. Tamara turns back to him and shakes her head, her voluminous hair bobbing with the motion. She smiles weakly at him as she holds the faceplate over his eyes. “These suit you.”

“Thank you. Are you—can I help you? Do you need something from me, Tamara?”

“Tamara...is that my name?” Her brow furrows in concentration, her mouth curling into a small frown. 

“Yes, it is. Don’t you remember?”

The faceplate drops to the floor with a loud clang. “No, I don’t,” she says, and steps backward, her eyes going wide. “I’ve lost time in the dark, I can’t remember anything, and—Oh! There was a light, and then a crash, and shaking violence and—”

“Tamara—“

Tony grips her by the shoulder as her eyes close and she wobbles unsteadily on her feet. He can feel her uniform shifting under his hands, glinting black strands flying over his fingers until they envelop her hair, her face, until the stars on her body and the crest on her chest burn bright white, blinding him in a flash.

Tony blinks the light out of his eyes, and opens them to stare face to face with Captain Universe.

He falls back a couple of steps, hip bumping against the edge of the workshop table. A movement in the corner of his vision tells him that Adam has stood up, coming to attention at Captain Universe’s appearance. Her eyes are two points of white light on her face, and Tony can’t help but feel exposed, like they are boring into him, piercing him through a wavelength of light he didn’t know existed.

He straightens his stance and speaks, his voice full of caution. “Is Tamara Devoux okay?”

Captain Universe tilts her head to the side, as though curious. "The host is broken. Everything is broken."

"But is she alright?"

“Tell me, Anthony Stark. Do you think there is a limit to how much things can be broken and still be fixed?”

An image of a man lying on cold, hard concrete comes to the forefront of his mind. Blond hair and broad shoulders, blank blue eyes staring straight ahead, unseeing. He feels something in his chest constrict, and he brings a hand up over the arc reactor.

Broken, unfixable things.

“I fix things. It’s what I do,” says Tony. He digs his fingers into the skin around the arc reactor, numb scar tissue that fan out like the lines of a circuit board. He’s talking to an entity as old and as vast as time and space, the living consciousness of the universe herself, compressed into a form he can comprehend. He thinks about compacting mass to infinitesimal levels of density, so heavy, so much in so small a space that it collapses into darkness and gravity.

To Tony, Captain Universe might as well be a black hole.

“I have to believe everything can be fixed as long as we try.” His voice, amazingly, does not tremble.

Captain Universe nods, and for a split second the darkness envelops him too. He is lost in the stars she wears as a shroud, until the moment passes, and he inhales a sharp intake of breath with a loud gasp.

“You are a builder of machines, to create and protect and destroy, and you’ve dismantled your heart and used the parts for salvage to do so. But no armor is fallible.”

Blood pounds loudly in his ears, as though to accompany her words with a real-time reminder of his mortality. He tries to come up with an answer, but anything he can say is inadequate. She’s right, of course she’s right, but he has no choice but to march on, and doesn’t she know _that_?

“I—I know what I have to do.”

“I do not fear for the strength of your convictions,” she says, “only what you are willing to lose to fulfil them. You will lose so much before the end. Do not be so generous with your sacrifices so early on.”

As soon as she finishes her warning, Captain Universe turns away from him and leaves the room. The lab is suddenly far smaller without her presence.

It takes several minutes for Tony's hands to stop shaking. He leans back against the table and slides to the floor, pulls his legs up and rests his head on his knees, trying to will away the dizzying sense of vertigo. He doesn’t know how long he sits there, unmoving, until a hand on his shoulder makes him look up. Adam stands over him, holding out his other hand wordlessly to help him stand. The crescent of light on the side of his face is dim. Tony pauses, looks at the offered hand, before accepting it and pulling himself to his feet.

The faceplate of the armor stares up at him from where it fell on the floor, blank and impassive.

* * *

  _ **now:**_

Tony pushes the goggles off his face and rubs at his eyes, blinking away the blue-white light of schematics and star maps, the holographic interfaces bright under his fingers. He's been working the moment they got back from the Peak, upgrading their two best quinjets and outfitting them for the long voyage ahead.

Right now, the best thing Tony can do is to make sure all his friends get to where they're supposed to go, as safe as his hands can promise it. Stellar cartography, spatial calculations using quaternion systems, the mathematics that allow him to bend the laws of physics as modern science understood it—this is something he can trust himself to do.

He hears Steve come in, but doesn’t turn around until he feels his presence right beside him. With a sideways glance, he sees Steve wearing a blue shirt that's loose even on his large frame. In his hands are two large mugs of coffee.

“One of those for me?” Tony asks.

Steve looks...tired, and not in the way that Tony most likely does at that very moment, with the 5 o’clock shadow and the deep-set circles under his eyes. Steve is the picture of perfect health and normal sleeping habits, but he’s emanating an unmistakable weariness, as though the entirety of all his invisible years manifests as a weight on his shoulders, instead of as lines on his face.

“Both of them, actually. Usually this would be the time of night when I’d try to ply you to bed,” Steve replies, with a nod of his head to the diagrams hovering around them, “but I know when to pick my battles.”

Tony takes one of the mugs gratefully, and replies only after he’s downed three-quarters of the scalding hot coffee in one go. He licks his lips appreciatively, before speaking. “At this rate, I’m gonna be blinking stars out of my eyes for the next week. I am pretty much over space forever. You finish talking to Carol?”

Steve nods sets down the other mug on the workshop table. “We finalised the rosters, two teams like we decided,” he says, before pausing. “Picking a team without you feels like it should be breaking a rule somewhere.”

“When you guys get back, we’ll set up company softball games, pick people without the safety of the universe depending on it for a change.”

“Well, we’ll have to play on Mars.”

“It’s gonna be a no-powers thing.”

“Try telling that to Thor. Or Carol,” Steve says, grinning.

“Fine. First rule of Avengers softball: no hitting the ball to the sun.”

The banter comes easy to them, as it always has, even though the million unspoken conversations underneath it all terrify Tony to his core. There are words that keep recurring, and he is infinitely glad Steve doesn’t even question them. ‘ _When you come back_ ’—four innocuous little words that become the prayer of a man who never allowed himself to believe in such things, but he can't help it, because the alternative is unthinkable.

And yet, that is precisely why he’s staying behind. He is the worst-case scenario, the last resort.

“Can’t Manifold just jump us all there?” Steve asks, rubbing his chin thoughtfully as he looks over the diagrams.

Tony shrugs, and pulls up a bunch of star maps with a wave of his hands. “Probably. We’re still trying to determine the parameters of what he can transport at a time, but regardless, you’re gonna need manoeuvrable spacecraft for the actual fighting.”

“Fighting in outer space and shooting lasers,” Steve deadpans.

“Yup. I’ve input all the major stellar and intrasystem warfare tactics I could get my hands on into the quincruiser databanks. I learned most of it just hanging out with Quill and Rocket, and you and Carol can pore over it all on the way there.” Tony magnifies a blueprint of the outfitted quincruiser with a grin. “Come on, it’ll be like Star Wars.”

“Which I still haven’t seen, as you well know.”

“I told you to stop putting it off.”

Steve just smiles, bright and wide, and Tony feels suddenly winded. “More team-bonding ideas. We’ll all watch it together once we get back.”

* * *

_At the end of all things, there is only fire, but you are no stranger to fire. The heat of the forge is familiar on your skin. Metal bends under your hands. Your will is made from iron._

_But now you must have faith. He will not leave you as easily as you think._

* * *

**_then:_ **

The honeycomb skeleton of the Dyson Sphere stretches out in front of him for miles, sprawling like a metal web over the surface of Sol. Some distance away, a pair of workers are installing a hexagonal solar panel into place. Sunlight catches on the gleam of metal, making Tony avert his eyes for just a moment, before he remembers that he doesn't need to.

Activated, the Shi’ar omnicast helmet barely registers as a weight on his head, not dissimilar to wearing the armor helmet. Tony just sometimes forgets that he isn’t actually standing on the surface of the sun. 

Looking outward, there are no stars visible this close to the sun, only an endless expanse of black. He can just make out the outline of Earth, if he squints.

It's quiet, up here, almost peaceful.

Tony steps forward, standing barefoot in his workshop in the basement of Stark Tower, and holds out his left hand, spreads his fingers wide apart to touch the sun. He can almost imagine the cleansing heat of the flames on his skin, solar fire flaring up and searing him back to stardust.

When it’s done, the sphere at 0.8% peak output can provide all the energy humanity will ever need for his lifetime. At 0.9%, it will be just enough power to destroy a world.

Tony wonders if his dad would’ve been proud. 

* * *

_**then:** _

Necropolis exists in a state of perpetual twilight, the sky bleeding the yellow-orange of a setting sun. Night never falls in the Wakandan city of the dead.

Most of the rest of the team had left right after, not staying for any longer than they had to, and Tony can’t really blame them. He wishes he never came to this place at all.

He sits at the stone conference table, still in his armor. He slumps in his chair such that he's eye-level with the helmet resting on the table. It had been T’Challa who volunteered to carry Steve’s unconscious body to the quinjet. It should have been him, but Tony thinks about how he can barely stand under his own power and dismisses the thought as sentiment.

He wishes he hadn’t chosen right now to remember the countless times he’d carried Steve, his arm slung over his shoulder while he stood on Tony’s left bootjet.

“Tony?”

He breaks his staring contest with the helmet to look up at Reed standing in the doorway, a tablet in hand.

“I’ve just sent the information you requested to your armor's system,” Reed says. “All the intelligence we gathered about incursions from the Black Swan, complete with the transcripts of each and every conversation T'Challa and I ever had with her.”

Tony nods perfunctorily, and goes back to staring at the face of his helmet. Old blueprints spring up to the forefront of his mind, vague plans for a machine to harness a star, the science-fiction he devoured as a kid turned into reality.

“It had to be done, Tony.”

Tony feels his eye twitch, and brings a hand to his temple. “I know, Reed. I agreed to it, remember?”

Reed steps forward, until he stands in front of the table across Tony. “You agreed because otherwise we would have done the same to you,” he says matter-of-factly. “You could’ve just walked away.”

“What would you have done in my place, Reed?” replies Tony. He is too tired to put any real venom in the question, and his words comes out flat, dispassionate. “What would you have done if it was Sue that told you she won’t let you sell your soul to save her?”

Reed’s eyes widen. “You and Steve...”

Tony grimaces, and looks away. “Yeah.”

“You’re compromised.”

Tony laughs, cruel and mirthless. “Of course I’m compromised,” he says. “We’re all compromised, Reed. Has anything of what we’ve done lately even resemble the actions of logical men? We’ve been here before, running purely on fear and good intentions.”

“I don’t believe in the concept of a soul, and neither do you.”

“And yet I’ve managed to sell mine a hilarious number of times.”

Reed brings his left hand up, and stares down into his palm. His expression is contemplative as he looks at his hand. “We’re selfish men, Tony. This is not the last hard decision we will have to make.”

“A part of me wants to think this is...punishment. Some sort of cosmic retribution for everything I’ve done.” Tony shakes his head. ”But we don't believe in god. There is no heaven. There is no hell. That’s why we’re doing this, isn’t it?”

Reed nods, his expression solemn. Tony desperately envies his certainty, evident in the set of his jaw and the curve of his shoulders. “This is the only life we have. Nothing we do matters,” Reed says, “and all that matters is what we do.”

In the ringing silence that follows, Tony wonders if there is a Tony Stark on that other world Steve pushed away with the Infinity Gauntlet. If, right now, that other Tony is speaking with his world’s Reed Richards and discussing their options on how to save their universe. Whether he's happy, either in blissful ignorance of the incursions, or in bewildered relief that his world didn’t end, somehow. If he went home today to his Steve and kissed him senseless.

Tony wonders if the other Tony will even know the price his happiness had cost.

It’s Reed who eventually breaks the silence, speaking as he walks out of the room. “Take care, Tony. This is only going to get worse before it gets better. Try to be happy while you still can.”

“I thought,” Tony speaks, his voice catching in his throat, “I thought I was finally done lying to him.”

Reed stops at the doorway, and speaks without facing him. “I wonder,” Reed says, “wouldn't it have been the more selfish decision to stand by him, and let us make you forget?”

Reed doesn’t wait for his reply before he leaves, but Tony speaks the answer out loud anyway. “I know I was being selfish. If I wasn’t, I would’ve asked Stephen to make him forget about us altogether,” he says to the helmet on the table. The armor doesn't offer any answers.

But he’ll find a way to make up for this. He has to, or he will have sold his soul for nothing yet again.

* * *

_**now:** _

Tony comes to bed hours later, slipping between the sheets in the dark. There are no stars in the New York City sky, but the lights of the city below form their own constellation, washing in from the windows to cut sharp shadows across the planes of Steve’s back. Tony winds his arms around Steve’s waist from behind, and he traces the knobs of Steve’s spine with his mouth, kissing between his shoulderblades, up to the nape of his neck.

“Promise me you’ll come back to me,” Tony says. His voice shakes with a fine tremble, as though whatever desperate thing is holding him together is fragile, paper-thin.

“I know. I will.” Steve’s voice is clear and wide-awake, instead of how it usually is after he’s just woken up. Tony doesn’t think he’ll ever fully be over discovering how Steve is right when he wakes, slow to come to, groggy as he blinks the sleep out of his eyes. His voice low and thick on the mornings when Tony kisses him to wakefulness, his movements easy and languorous as he kisses back, holds him close out of muscle memory.

But Steve never went to sleep, waiting for him to come in. He turns around to face Tony, his hands coming up to wrap around his neck in a warm embrace. Then he presses a hand on Tony’s shoulder and pushes him onto his back, and Steve is suddenly above him on his hands and knees, straddling his waist.

Tony closes his eyes and grins from ear to ear before laughing, quiet and faintly hysterical. “Fuck, why does it feel as though you’re off to war and I’m the girl back home?”

“You’re not. You’re the last line of defense, to protect Earth—“

“I should come with you, I should fight right beside you—“

“You're staying behind because you’re the only one I trust to do this.”

The incursion device lies heavy in the palm of his left hand, the metal circle just waiting to blink bright red to warn of the latest end of the world. If he were a better person, a _good_ person, he would push Steve away, tell him exactly how undeserving he is of his trust. Of how he’s lying to him even now. He can lose Steve forever and the last thing Tony will have done to him was lie.

Tony throws his left arm over his eyes. “I know, Steve. But you can’t—you have to come back to me—”

A hand wraps around his wrist and pulls his arm away, presses it flat into the mattress beside his head. A thumb presses into his palm. “We’re going to win, Tony. I promise you.” Steve's voice is soft, almost a whisper, and Tony listens to the words and hoards them greedily, uses them to keep from falling apart. 

Steve’s nothing like him. Steve wouldn't lie to him.

Steve leans down and kisses Tony on his mouth, on his throat, on his chest. Steve kisses Tony until he’s breathless, until there is no more space for the numbers in his head, the calculations making room for the sensation of teeth biting his lower lip, the searing warmth of tongue tracing his collarbone as Steve undresses him. 

Tony spreads his legs apart as Steve kneels between them, his hands finding their way to grip the back of Tony's knees and hiking them up atop his shoulders. Tony’s bent in half as Steve leans forward to grab the lube from their bedside table, his other hand pressing on the back of his thigh. The hand moves down his leg, trailing from his kneecap to come to a rest on his ankle. Steve meets Tony’s gaze as he holds his ankle in hand and pulls it forward, pressing his mouth softly on the hollow underneath the bone.

There’s a lump in Tony’s throat at the almost unbearable intimacy of the gesture, and the fierce intensity in Steve’s eyes, reflecting the blue of his arc reactor. Tony tries to concentrate on breathing, and digging his fingernails into the muscle of Steve’s shoulders, and not moaning too loudly. A slick hand slips between his legs, gripping firmly around his cock. Thick, callused fingers slide inside him and spread him open.

It’s frantic and desperate when it should be slow and languid, _gentle_ , but Tony only groans shamelessly, wraps his legs tighter around Steve’s waist as Steve enters him, presses his heels into the small of his back. Fever-warm skin presses on almost every inch of him. There’s a wordless freneticism to the kisses, an unmistakable urgency bleeding into the way Steve ravages his mouth and thrusts into his body, hard and fast. Steve is hot and almost painfully large inside him, and Tony can barely breathe for the pace of it all.

Steve fucks him, kisses him deep, and for one irrational second, Tony worries that Steve can taste his heart thudding in the back of his throat. He grits his teeth and claws at Steve’s back, too much and not enough all at once, and Tony wants it all to last forever.

When Tony comes, he cries loudly, sounding wounded, and Steve swallows the noises into his mouth, and shudders as his own orgasm hits moments later. He collapses on top of Tony, resting precariously on his elbows. The wash of blue reactor light gleams dimly on Steve’s sweat-slick skin, on the rise and fall of his chest, and it’s an image that Tony’s committed to memory a thousand times over.

It’s several moments before Tony can hear himself breathe over the sound of his pounding heart. He tries not to be reminded of beating drums.

Steve presses his mouth softly on Tony’s lips, his eyes closed. Even in the dark, Tony can make out the outline of his eyelashes.

“This wasn’t goodbye,” Tony says, his voice hoarse. “You’ll fight, and you’ll win, and you’ll come back to me.”

There is so much more at stake with all that's happening, but at this moment, Tony can’t think of anything more important than the two of them.

"I will. Just wait for me." Steve punctuates the words with kisses, on his cheekbones, on his brow, on his eyelids. "Just wait for me."

Tony clenches his left hand into a fist, digging his nails into his palm, until he can feel the small disc of metal and glass underneath the skin. “I'll wait. I'll wait as long as I have to."

* * *

_Everything is broken. Everything is breaking down, and so you build machines to stop it. You build machines to harness stars and shatter worlds, and you have dismantled your own heart and used the parts for salvage to do so. You build machines because it is the only thing you know how to do._

_You build machines out of desperation, out of love._

_That is your story, and therefore my story. As all stories are the same, in that all the stories are mine. Understand?_  

* * *

_**then:** _

It’s late at night, and he’s standing in front at the blue-green chart of the team roster, arms crossed over his chest. The circle of Carol’s Hala star emblem blinks white, along with Jessica, Natasha, Sam, Bobby, and Shang-Chi’s—they deployed a couple of hours ago in response to a crisis, but Steve knows that isn't really the reason why he's still awake. There’s the headache pounding behind eyes again, intermittent but persistent as always.

Steve turns around at a sound at the doorway to find Tony, barefoot, grease-stained in a black undershirt, hands tucked into the pockets of his ill-fitting jeans—there’s something inexplicably endearing in that reliable, familiar image. Whatever terrible thing is going on wherever in the world, Tony is probably in his workshop tinkering with something, most likely in response to that same crisis.

“Headaches again?”

“I’m monitoring Carol’s team as they fly into Hong Kong. They’re infiltrating an AIM operation there. We think they managed to get their hands on volatile material from an origin bomb site.”

Tony walks until he is standing right behind Steve, and rests his hands on Steve’s hips. “I’m guessing that’s a yes then.”

“I only get them sometimes.”

“I have a suggestion,” Tony says innocently, even as he speaks the words against the back of Steve’s neck.

“Really, Tony? And here I was thinking you had an actual solution,” Steve replies, putting his hands on top of Tony’s.

There’s a small pause, before Tony answers. “I’m an engineer. The most important thing about solutions is that they work, Rogers. Orgasms release endorphins. Nature’s natural advil, except more fun?”

Steve laughs, and shuts off the console with a click. He turns around to kiss Tony, but pauses, taken aback by how Tony looks up close, with the small, forced smile, the dark circles underneath his eyes. He brings a hand up to Tony’s jaw, tracing a gaunt cheekbone with his thumb. “Are you okay, Tony?”

Tony’s eyes widen, and Steve thinks it’s surprise or fear that shows on his face, but it’s quickly replaced by an expression of false cheer. “Come on, Steve. I was trying to worry about you and then you try to turn it on me?”

“Tony, I—” is all Steve manages before Tony takes his mouth, effectively cutting off the words before they can be said aloud. There’s a certain desperation to the way Tony kisses him, as though he's worried Steve will disappear at any given moment, and there are questions Steve wants to ask but right now, he only kisses back. Questions can wait, he thinks, but he only has so many chances to give comfort, reassurance. He moans Tony’s name into his mouth, tangles his fingers in his hair, and knows Tony will tell him, given time. They’ll work out whatever it is, they always have.


End file.
